This is the very beginning of my substack. The first series will be a repost of my linkedin articles: https://lnkd.in/dRNSYPWC
Here is why and how we can create a new technology stack, a tale about computer architecture and geopolitics in four parts.
“Why do Americans eat like they have free healthcare?”
“Why do Europeans digitize like they have secure information systems?”
It is February 2025, and the MAGAs are running the Whitehouse according to Steve Bannon´s “muzzle velocity strategy”, or wrestling as historian Stephen Kotkin aptly characterizes this fourth power distraction strategy. The Trump, Vance administration is doing wonders to the awakening of a sleepy and confused Europe. As a European I can’t help but welcome this development to some limited extent. I´m certainly happy Putin isn’t doing all the heavy lifting on his own. The side effects of the tools in his toolbox are simply too horrendous.
Europe, not just Germany, has been a naïve consumer of Russian energy, Chinese labor and American security, again according to Kotkin, and I get the feeling that this is popular opinion in the US in general. For various reasons these are now all in short supply. The end of freeriding on Chinese labor is mostly a loss for China's strategic positioning in the global supply chains, even if some stuff will get more expensive. And as with Russian energy, it is sort of a self-inflicted supply issue founded in what should by now be obvious strategic concerns of an unhealthy dependency on adversarial regimes.
Authoritarian regimes have a common dysfunction, they are not very good at delivering sustained prosperity for their own population. China may seem like a counter example if you only value money, but the growth can be explained by a freeride on western capitalists selling out the working and middle class through means of otherwise somewhat useful globalization. Once the hope of upward socioeconomic mobility for the masses in the authoritarian regime has faded, the need for an external enemy becomes salient. The dictator now needs to find a promising conflict to escalate.
“Et tu, Brute?”
Liberal democracies unfortunately become the authoritarian leader’s obvious choice in enemy for two reasons; Number one, the liberal democracies provide a credible alternative, this is up and above the most life-threatening concept for any authoritarian leader. Second a liberal democracy does not react aggressively to harassment, at first. They function more like a pressure boiler and less like a bully as other authoritarian regimes does. Unfortunately, pressure boilers have very non-linear response, once the stressors reach critical threshold, strategy and alignment become simple and the creative, but unaligned and often confused liberal democracy becomes lethal. It’s like putting a magnet towards iron filings. All the unaligned entities suddenly self-organize in a way that was not possible to discern before the external force significantly interact with the liberal democracies.
This is initially not a concern for the authoritarian leader looking for a suitable target to bully in the beginning of his [sic] inevitable peril with this downward spiral. This is why liberal democracies can´t have deep peace anymore in the current world configuration. And this is why we must get our deterrence in shape by every means possible, or risk having to fight World War Three. That is the stakes.
Computer architecture is not going to be at the very cutting edge of deterrence, but it is going to be in everything, and a lot of it will have to be online and available to everyone. Trust and transparency are large defining parts of who we are, and we cannot afford to lose who we are just to win. Further one of our strategic advantages are in wide reaching, high trust alliances, not very amenable to closed or air gapped systems. This is why we need a new technology stack for our compute needs that can substantially shift the cyber battle fields in favor of the defenders. In military parlance this is about surfaces and gaps. Surfaces are prepared defensive lines; gaps are a lack of such structures. In part three we will identify some gaps that we so far have failed to close in our compute systems.
To sustain a relevant economic presence, which again is the basis for sustained deterrence, we would also need a new compute stack to be fast and energy efficient. And to compensate for the lack of a huge FAANG SRE (administrator) talent pool outside the state of California, we are also in need of a technology stack that can shed the layers of accidental complexity inherent to our current systems. Of course, such a capability is not something only liberal democracies can gain from, but for smaller states seeking digital sovereignty this is not just a nice-to-have, it is a need-to-have.
To sum it up; a low complexity, secure and fast compute stack is a need-to-have for digital sovereignty and sustained deterrence. Part two lays out the high-level strategy, part three examines the nature of the problem and part four identifies some key tactical capabilities of a design.
I do not have references for the claims found here, but if you want to get inspiration from some of the people that has informed my opinions, I recommend looking up Stephen Kotkin and Sarah C. Paine.
